With the fast-charging growth in cloud storage, you have to think that the providers would be demanding higher capacity drives to get more storage in the cabinets. Well they are getting their wish.

HGST, the former Hitachi hard drive division that has since been acquired by Western Digital, announced an enterprise-class HelioSeal brand 10TB hard drive aimed at applications with deep archive needs. As the name implies, the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 is filled with helium, which is said to help reduce friction in the spinning platter and increase the drive’s life span.

The Ultrastar Archive also uses another Hitachi creation, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), to write data to the disk. SMR increases the storage density, but comes at a slight performance cost. This makes it best suited for archival drives, which is what the Ha10 is.

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